On Being a Worthy Heir of the Agrarian Contrarians

There arrived in yesterday’s mail an attractive book, new from Chelsea Green, titled A Sanctuary of Trees. A hand-written note from the director of communications, addressed to me, said “Gene asked me to send you a copy of his latest book.”

“Gene” is Gene Logsdon, a name well-known, I expect, to many denizens of the Front Porch. Gene belongs to that fraternity of older agrarian contrarians that includes, among others, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, David Kline, and the late Maury Telleen.

Gene Logsdon: the Contrary Farmer. His many books include The Contrary Farmer, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, Homesteading: How to Find New Independence on the Land, The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (reviewed here by yours truly), You Can Go Home Again, and three works of fiction: The Lords of Folly, The Last of the Husbandmen, and Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food, which is a book you can dislike only if you have a serious flaw in your character.

I had just enough time between mind-numbing meetings yesterday afternoon to leaf through A Sanctuary of Trees. The early pages have a good bit to say about Logsdon’s early mis-education: a preparatory school for boys who were seminary-bound, and then seminary.

“I made probably the stupidest decision of my life,” Logsdon writes, “only to have it turn out to be the smartest thing I ever did. I decided to listen to my teachers when they suggested that I should study to become a priest.” The reason he decided to do this, he goes on to say, is that “the high school prep-seminary … was situated on four hundred acres of woodland. My cousin Ed, who was my frequent companion in the woods, decided to go too. We thought about those four hundred acres and decided it might turn out to be fun to study for the priesthood.”

Confidence in this decision eroded some, thanks in large measure to clerical ignorance regarding mushrooms. Logsdon explains how he once found the mother lode of all morel patches and persuaded the cooks, German nuns, to fry them up in butter. “You can’t go wrong with anything fried in butter.” But the rector, who wasn’t raised in the woods, wanted to know why Logsdon was trying to poison everyone. Recurrence to the science teacher, who knew better, failed: “He merely mumbled that the first lesson of the priestly life was to obey orders.”

So, writes Logsdon, “from that day on, I started to doubt my decision to become a priest.” He had learned two important lessons: priests didn’t necessarily know as much as he did, and those who did know the truth might not necessarily “have the guts to stand up for it.”

But Logsdon continued his mis-education for many years, mainly because he was “almost always in close contact with the natural environment” he so loved. After the prep-school there was a novitiate year in Indiana, “mostly awful” but nonetheless sufferable, desirable even, because it played out near a “woodland … dotted with lakes.” Then came the seminary.

Now at this point in my quick perusal of A Sanctuary of Trees I realized that I had to run off to a meeting I knew would be hijacked by someone who can’t stay on task, but I also knew that the next part of the story was going to concern me somewhat indirectly, so I kept reading. (The thing about committees is that they get nothing done whether you’re on time for them or not.)

The seminary Logsdon attended stood along the banks of the Grand River in Michigan. And all the area surrounding it was farmland. Logsdon “became a river rat as well as a woods rat.” He and his hard-cider-making classmates “roamed the woodland … fished for walleye pike, hunted rabbits, and trapped for mink and muskrat.” One of their teachers, a priest, called them “the Sonuvabitchin’ Davy Crockett boys.” Logsdon “felt as free as the hawks that [he] could watch out the classroom windows, hanging high over the river.”

The seminary about which Logsdon writes was, and is, a large Tudor mansion situated on M-99 about fifteen or twenty miles southwest of Michigan’s capital city. But the mansion is no longer a seminary; it is a high-end restaurant and B&B called “Dusty’s English Inn.” It is patronized by people who (in Rumpole’s memorable phrase) are rich enough to afford very small portions of food.

I was talking to Logsdon on the phone a few years ago, and he was telling me about this seminary he attended in Michigan. “Where in Michigan?” I asked. He said, “you’ve never heard of it.” I said, “try me.” He said, “Eaton Rapids.” I said, “that’s my dad’s hometown. I’ve got uncles and cousins who still live there.”

Earlier in our conversation Logsdon had told me that in his seminary days he had been lonesome for his farm back home and that he used to canoe down the river, tie off, and walk among the cows on a nearby farm. So now I asked him whether he tied off on the left or the right side of the river. “Left,” he said. And I said, “that was probably my grandfather’s farm you were trespassing on!”

This was a phone conversation, so we couldn’t hold hands and sing “It’s a Small World After All,” but at that moment I felt as if it might be possible to shrink the world back to its proper size.

Not long after that I was in Michigan, traveling down M-99. I pulled off the highway and snapped a photograph of the Tudor mansion, which I later sent to Logsdon. He wrote back, his words throbbing with that exquisite pain we call nostalgia, which, of course, is also an intense kind of pleasure. He said he could remember the very spot on that property where he decided to be not a priest but a writer.

“The woodland sanctuary … saved me,” he writes in this new book. “It kept me sane … until I found myself, and then it convinced me to leave a life I was not fit for.” (Years later Wendell Berry would wryly understate the case to me: ‘it would seem that Gene’s parents singled out the wrong son for the priesthood.’)

And now here we have his twenty-second book, which I can’t wait to give my attention to. I think it will be the first book in the queue during finals week—before the avalanche of papers and blue books buries me.

And this is a propos of pretty much nothing save real places and the morels that sometimes grow in them, but, because we care about place here, and since I’ve mentioned morels, I’ll tell it anyway. One of my oldest friends lives in this same small Michigan town, and one of my favorite stories about him begins with his slicing a golf ball into the woods one day in late spring. (His swing resembles an octopus trying to put on panty-hose; the result of it is seldom pretty.) He trudged off into the bramble to look for the ball, as he often must, but he never found it. The Eagle Scout in him kicked in, and he came out of the woods toting not a Titleist but 110 morel mushrooms. Eaton Rapids is as fine a place to be in as to be from. (And it’s the only one on earth, as the signs at the city limits emphatically declare.)

Gene Logsdon is a frequent contributor to Farming magazine, edited by the aforementioned David Kline, an Amish farmer who, like Logsdon, also lives in Ohio. Subscription is not expensive, and what you read there is a damn site more valuable than most of what passes for news.

We owe something to these old agrarian contrarians; they deserve to have heirs worthy of the good work they’ve spent their lives doing. I daresay the Front Porch is a place (in the non-place sense of the word) where such heirs may be found. And it is well that we be worthy of our forebears.

Jason Peters professes English at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, where he teaches courses in Milton, the Catholic novel, Environmental literature, British Romanticism, and American literature prior to 1900.
While in Illinois he pines for the mysterious and musical tea-colored trout streams of his native Michigan, whither he is trying to repatriate full-time in order to raise cattle and chickens, make beer, and scourge the follies of higher ed. (Read an attempt here.)
His work has appeared in such places as the ­Sewanee Review, the South Atlantic Quarterly, English Language Notes, Explicator, American Notes and Queries, Christianity and Literature, Orion, First Principles, University Bookman, and the Journal of Religion and Society. He is also the editor of Wendell Berry: Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky 2007) and Land! The Case for an Agrarian Economy, by John Crowe Ransom (University Press of Notre Dame, 2017).
Currently he is building a fly rod and juggling just enough writing projects to prevent his completing any of them: an account of his repatriation efforts (tentatively titled Dispatches from Dumb-Ass Acres, by a Dumb Ass), another book on Wendell Berry, another on food (tentatively titled The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Thieving Gourmand), and yet another on that neglected genius, Owen Barfield.
He has tried to break life-long debilitating addictions to basketball and golf but has been woefully unsuccessful.
Peters visits Rock Island on school days but otherwise lives in Williamston, Michigan, with his longsuffering wife, their three children, and his two arthritic knees.
See books written and recommended by Jason Peters.

2 COMMENTS

I am reminded that the Psalmist in Psalm 1:3 uses an agrarian metaphor for a faithful person:

“That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.”

Our Lord uses a similar metaphor in John 15: 1-8:

1 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. 2 He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. 3 You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

St. Paul writes in Galatians 5: 22-23:

“22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”

The fruit of the Spirit which is made manifest nine ways, fruits which come by surrendering and submitting the ego and the will to the Spirit through the Christ, is contrasted by works as St. Paul usually speaks of them, works which are, even at their best, products of our wills and our egos.

The true agrarian life demands submission and humility: a good start for walking creaturely and Christianly, be one every so much a contrarian.

I must say that I have generally heard more eloquence in the wind rustling through the trees than many a somber homily between excessive kneelings. Not always of course, but on average perhaps. The Lord is within after all. He doth not issue from dry lecterns.